La: The Dental Semivowel

La is the twenty-eighth consonant of the varnamala, the third of the four semivowels, and the partner of the rare vocalic l among the vowels. It is a dental lateral, made with the tongue tip at the teeth while the air passes at the sides of the tongue, and the grammarians classed it with the dentals for that reason while placing it among the antahstha in the table. In the older language l and r alternate in ways that vary between the Vedic dialects, some of which strongly prefer one where others prefer the other in the same words, and the relationship between the two is one of the standing questions of Indo-Aryan historical phonology.

A retroflex counterpart exists, absent from classical Sanskrit as a separate letter but present in Vedic recitation and in several modern languages including Marathi; it is written with this letter modified and has its own place in the Unicode encoding. The letter's combining forms in conjuncts are less drastic than those of the semivowel before it, and its independent shape is straightforward to recognise. Both the dictionaries and the Unicode encoding treat the retroflex lateral as a character in its own right rather than as a variant of this one, so a text that uses it can be searched and sorted correctly. Whether a given edition prints it depends on the recitational tradition its editor follows, and the same Vedic passage can appear with the letter in one respectable edition and without it in another.